Integrity in Commerce
Conscious businesses that are aware of the scope, depth, and long-range impacts of their Integrity in Commerce actions are key to achieving sustainability. Business must become an ethical steward of the Integrity in Commerce Earth’s ecology and consciously establish an economic basis for a future of equitably shared abundance.
The world is changing at a rapid pace. The kinds of businesses that are succeeding today, quite frankly, may have never made it past the development phase in prior decades. Behemoths that have dominated centuries of economic interaction are now on life support. Too many people are simply blaming this on a combination of mediocre government policy and a few corporate bad apples. But to understand that the world economy is run by some of the smartest people on earth, and then blame the whole thing on rudimentary assumptions about issues those at the top knew like the back of their hand, is disingenuous.
The true issue behind the potential collapse of the global system is a change in the fundamentals of commerce. An influx of information and a change in the way the majority of businesspeople look at the world around them has caused a major paradigm shift. And it is a shift towards a more natural, profitable way of doing business. However, it is also a shift that will seriously damage all economic institutions that refuse to adapt. We are moving into an age of business where only flexible companies that focus on their human assets, allowing the people within the firm to drive the success of the business instead of placing them in synthetic and restrictive roles, will come out ahead. This is being proven all across the modern economy, where the best places to work find healthy profit margins and the corrupt companies that once found it easy to out-compete their rivals are facing the imprisonment of their chief executives.
The best way of enhancing the human factor of your business, is to come to an understanding of the great paradigm shift that is taking place in the business community. It is a shift towards the most organic, most fluent kind of interaction between people: a more natural kind of transaction. The first thing that brought people together in order to construct something together, to create something positive, was our belief in something more than ourselves. Faith, belief, spirituality, whatever you want to call it – the main driving factor within it was the creation of more prosperous communities. Yet while the ancient Greeks may have feared not being spiritual would bring the wrath of the gods down upon their heads, today there is a more scientific approach being undertaken in introducing spirituality back into our wealth building. Today, we have the ability to realize that spirituality brings out the best in each of us individually and allows those contributions to amalgamate in such a form that the peak of human potential is reached. Instead of being spiritual in order to avoid the judgment of God, we are spiritual in order to reap the benefits of putting the good of the world ahead of ourselves.
This is the business tool of the future – creating more efficient, trustworthy, and caring networks of people in the business of raising their collective standards of living. Whether or not this translates into a global feeling of good will is yet to be seen, but it has already translated into a higher calibre business style that is stealing the hearts and minds of consumers away from old-school corporate monoliths. And this is just the beginning of a very long, very permanent, process going on all around us here in 2010 and beyond.
For more on this topic read God Goes to Work written by Tom Zender and available online and at bookstore everywhere. This timely book explains how successful individuals and firms are changing the way they do business by accessing and utilizing a vast reservoir of untapped energy. Learn why Spirituality is the basis for success and the most important asset you have in elevating you and your business to a new level of performance. www.TomZender.com
TOM ZENDER is President Emeritus of Unity that serves over three million people of all faiths worldwide. He is a recognized spiritual leader and corporate executive with decades of success, who has held management positions at General Electric and Honeywell, and was a Senior VP in NYSE and NASDAQ listed corporations. His corporate board experience includes NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange listed companies.
Social injustice, poverty, ecological devastation. Can we repair these global problems? According to world-renowned author teacher and thinker Deepak Chopra, technology– and LinkedIn– has the potential to heal the planet in many ways, by fostering relationships.
"I believe that technology is the manifestation of God through the human nervous system,‖ Deepak said. ―The Internet is the new planetary mind. It’s not just connectivity. It’s nurturing relationships."
Deepak shared these insights, along with other ideas from his new book, The Soul Of Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential For Greatness, at LinkedIn’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View.
According to Gallup, 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is actively disengaged– costing the U.S. economy $380 billion a year. If you work in an environment where your colleague or your superior ignores you, your likelihood of getting disengaged goes up by 45 percent. But if colleague notices a single strength you have, your disengagement falls to less than 1 percent. The solution, Deepak says, is nurturing your colleagues. And that happens through connecting.
Deepak contends that the best way to empower employees is to focus on their strengths. He cited Gallup research that shows that the four most important things people expect of their leaders are hope, compassion, trust and stability.
He spoke about how good leaders take calculated risks that comes from a deeper understanding of context, meaning and relationship. The most important thing, Deepak said, is living up to your values, being responsible for feedback and maintaining good health.
"If you focus on success, you’ll have stress," Deepak said. "But if you pursue excellence, success will be guaranteed."
Quite simply, the time has come to realize that the world will never be the same again. The markets will never hold the same sense of security they once did, when we piled our retirement savings into them without a second thought. Even our own homes represent fear for us now–that they could be repossessed on such a massive scale, cold-heartedly and without the blink of an eye. Because those that worked for the mortgage company themselves faced the heartless voice of their creditors over the phone, and had no choice but to pull the same crap on you.
Everybody panicked – let’s get that straight. This last recession showed the worst of us. Millionaires were scrounging to make ends meet, not paying their employees and backing out of contracts. Landlords began evicting people far more quickly than ever before, because they were paranoid that it was the only way to keep their investment going. Distrust was rampant. The huge fluctuations on the stock exchanges were the direct result of people trading without a care in the world for anybody else, just trying to get out as much money as they could from the "casino" Wall Street seemed to become.
Friends turned on one another. Couples divorced. Let’s not sugar coat things here. There were some heart-warming stories, yes, but there were far more devastating tales of human selfishness and insecurity. The story of this recession will no doubt be rewritten as an example of the American spirit persevering, but such is not the case. The recession got worse and worse with every bad decision – companies firing workers instead of sacrificing profits or simply lowering wages temporarily, families abandoning local businesses for cheaper discount goods, politicians selling out to interest groups in order to try and save their hides. It was the end of the Newtonian era of treating corporations like giant machines and every employee and consumer associated with them as cogs in the wheels. The machines ground to a halt, and there is no restarting them – ever again. The jobs represented by them are gone forever to third world countries starting their own industrial revolutions. The companies that caused this mess are being forced to transform by new technologies and rapidly advancing manufacturing techniques.
We are at a precipice, and there are only two choices. Stay where we are, get bitter and annoyed with the world and look for somebody to blame, or treat this recession like the birth pang of a new world that it is. There is a lot of anger out there, most of it being entirely wasted on protest rallies and letter writing campaigns. This is because anger is always a waste. The world has been thrown from the nest of Newton, where we were fed from the mouths of plutocratic industrialists and struggled with basic issues of equality, down onto the ground of the real world. The place where we have to cooperate, and where no company is too big to fail.
The only way forward is to recognize that we all had a part in this recession, just as we all have a hand in this recovery. Blame will, to conjure a little bit of Yogi Berra, kill this economy dead. The angst of being let down by the economy that we thought would just go on forever without having to be supervised by we the people must pass. We will never go back to the way things were... because we are headed somewhere better. For after we apologize to one another, we will get to talking... and get to thinking, as we always do... and what comes next, is more than at any other time in the history of the world, up to you!
For more on this topic read God Goes to Work written by Tom Zender and available online and at bookstore everywhere. This timely book explains how successful individuals and firms are changing the way they do business by accessing and utilizing a vast reservoir of untapped energy. Learn why Spirituality is the basis for success and the most important asset you have in elevating you and your business to a new level of performance. www.TomZender.com
TOM ZENDER is President Emeritus of Unity that serves over three million people of all faiths worldwide. He is a recognized spiritual leader and corporate executive with decades of success, who has held management positions at General Electric and Honeywell, and was a Senior VP in NYSE and NASDAQ listed corporations. His corporate board experience includes NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange listed companies.